Web 2.0, Social Media and Neologism

Language has always been a dynamic repository of words, expressions and metaphors. So addition of new words to the lexicon is not a novel concept. But when it comes to technology, it is not just the way we do things that is changing at a maddening speed, it is also the words we use and the lingo we speak that is morphing at an ever accelerating speed.

Even though it may make the sticklers of proper English bristle, Oxford English Dictionary (OED) just added brand new entries  like OMG, LOL and FYI that so far existed only in chat rooms and the texting world. So don’t be puzzled when they show up next in your favorite newspaper article along with expressions like BFF (Best Friends Forever), IMHO (In my humble opinion) or  TMI (Too much information). 

Words that did not exist even a decade ago now touch us like never before, when we talk about spam, blog, cloud computing, phishing, crowdsourcing, e-books, geotagging, GPS, walled garden, Netlingo.com even had a Youtube video to explain the “Walled Garden” phenomenon. So next time you and I talk, I won’t be raising my curious eye-brows as you sprinkle the conversation with  words like “scareware” (malicious computer program),  “Cyberbullying”, “Clickjacking”  (manipulating a user’s activity by concealing hyperlinks).

Social Media and the Lexical Meme:

Since the days of Myspace, social media continues to unleash a torrent of new words. In addition to defining the avian meaning (i.e., chirping), Dictionary.com now formally defines Twitter as “a website where people can post short messages”. Twitter, in its turn has spawned many new derivatives like Tweet, Tweetup, Hashtags - all included in a dedicated glossary page.

The truth is, lexically speaking, the phrase “catching up with technology” is assuming a whole new meaning. As I was writing this blog, I came across several words that seemingly are part of the everyday parlance of social media. Some are more intuitive, such as moblog (blog published from a mobile device), others are less so but perfectly meaningful like  copy-left (the legal framework to balance the flaws of copyright),  creative commons or digital story. A good reference for the un-initiated may be found in this socialbrite.org page.  

While Twitter and Facebook are household terms understood globally, you may come across a few other terms like “Digg Me” or “Disqus”, tagged below the next blog you will read. Digg is a social news site that lets people discover and share content. Users submit links and stories and the community votes them up or down. Users can “digg” stories they like or “bury” the ones they don’t.

The word I personally love most is “MASHUP”. It shows up in multiple contexts – in music, in software  development.  Mashup songs are a  popular trend that fuse two known songs in to a new composite remix. Here’s a popular one - We R Dynamite – a mashup of  Taio Cruz and Ke$ha’s Dynamite and  We R who we R. For application development, mashup techniques combine data from multiple sources to create a new integrated app. An early mashup example is the apartment hunting tool that took data from sources such as Craigslist and combined them with mapping or photo database (e.g., Google maps and Street view) to create a new app with visualizations of the data. Zillow mashed up data from other real estate web sites and combined it with Google Map or MS Virtual Earth to create real estate applications displayed to the user on a map. With standardized APIs, possibilities are limitless, when it comes to innovating new value simply by mashing up existing apps. 

There is an app for that –

 As always is the case now – no matter what subject we might be talking about, there is possibly an app for that…. There is a $0.99 iPhone app to tell you all about the new acronyms for the web. So if you’re a parent of a teen who wants to make sense of a text someone might be passing to your youngster or vice versa, here is your education. 

Of course there will never be a dictionary to keep a live record of all the new social code words that are popping every day. Netlingo.com has a real time compiling of such a list. To make sense of any code words in unwanted texts or spams, and to know when not to touch those mails or texts, here is a good reference for parents.  A word of caution – while many of the acronyms are innocuous, several carry inappropriate connotations. Hopefully they will help you raise the red flag when you see one. 

That's all for today. 10Q for your attention. BBFN.

Efficient Multi-tasking – The Myth that does not seem to go away

The other day at work I walked to someone’s office for a pre-appointed meeting. I was on time, warmly welcomed and gestured to take a seat. Soon enough I realized that the speaker-phone on the desk was on and there was a live call that my host was intermittently joining and muting. Regardless, our discussion slowly started. Soon, I noticed that he was also checking his blackberry calendar from time to time. Our meeting continued with an occasional spaced-out look from my host as he tried to keep an ear to the ongoing call. Some times, he made a few disjointed comments to the unseen participants of the call, efficiently muting it back. Suddenly, distracted by some supposedly “hot” email chime, he began texting to someone. At this point, I had it. I politely suggested that I might have come at a wrong time and perhaps we could reschedule. “Oh no, no…”, he was superbly gracious. “Your time is important, so let’s continue and finish the conversation now. Don’t worry about the call or the SMS. I am a pretty good multi-tasker”….

It is time to seriously challenge the “coolness” and glory of such multi-tasking in today’s culture. Look at the well known 2009 Stanford University study by Clifford Nass involving several self-declared super-multi-tasker youngsters. These kids were at the leading edge of simultaneous IM conversation, texting, emailing, social networking while doing everything else and claimed to have full cognitive control. However, when given a series of mental tasks like puzzles and memory games, these chronic multi-taskers consistently under-performed relative to low or non-multi-taskers. Check out this PBS interview of Dr. Nass on his research. 

So what’s at play here..? The multitude of web and information technology has made multi-tasking both easy and endemic.  But every time we switch from one task to another, there is a “switching cost” of time, as we turn off one part of the brain and turn on another. Second, human brain functions by relating data, picture or information in front of us. As we switch from task to task, images or data from all other tasks tend to clog the brain, impeding any analytical effort that needs only selective data from that mess. Multi-taskers’ rationale is that they do five things at once because they don’t have time to do them one at a time. Turns out, they might be more efficient if they actually did things one after another.

Even for a computer with a single core micro-processor, multitasking involves time-sharing with only one task active at a time. Typically, these tasks are rotated through many times a second, with a miniscule but finite ‘Context switching’, time lost in between. However, with multi-core processor computers, each core can perform a separate task simultaneously.

For those more geekily inclined, there is a nice 2001 blog piece by Joel Spolsky that gives a simple example from a programming point of view to establish that:

1. even without any task switching costs, sequential processing gets you results faster on average.

2. the longer it takes to task switch, the bigger the penalty you pay for multitasking.

To elaborate the concept, let me borrow a graph from project management paradigm (cited in codinghorror.com)  from Gerald Weinberg’s “Quality Software Management –Systems Thinking” that conceptualizes the relative time share between a software project and the wasted time in context switching as more projects are added to the workload. Be sure to check a similar blog titled Twitter Curve by George Mulhern. 

  

The point, however is NOT to avoid or shun these fantastic tools that human mind is innovating. I love Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook, texting and SMS. The point is that our comfort and expertise notwithstanding, we often take a myopic view and believe that we can text, email, phone and think at the same time without sacrificing the quality of any of these. The going paradigm often is that we can IM, watch a movie and do homework or solve problems without degrading the quality of the solving process. Overwhelmingly, studies indicate that we really can’t, at least not without degradation in terms of time, quality or ability to think effectively.

Technically speaking, it is possible that after thousands (perhaps millions) of years of such multi-tasking, the human brain might evolve itself to a multi-core processor to bridge the gap of context switching between individual tasks. (Those who are not convinced of Darwinian science of course won’t even have such hopes; the only possibility for them might be to petition the Creator to go back to the drawing board and re-design the human brain for multi-core processing).

Let me end today with another blog article by Myra White  where she mentions psychologist Csikszentmihalyi’s work to underline that some of our most meaningful and creative moments happen when we’re so absorbed in the task at hand that we become one with the task and lose track of everything else. Many of the Aha or the Eureka events and innovation happen during these very moments. 

2011 Tsunami – Technology, Warning System and Japanese Perseverance

The double whammy of earthquake and tsunami in Northern Japan was a sobering reminder of how tiny we humans still are in the hands of the forces of nature. The live videos of furious water mowing down and engulfing buildings, trucks, cars and neighborhoods as if they were little debris seemed like a trailer from a disaster movie. The ruinous aftermath notwithstanding, I can’t help thinking what would have happened had this occurred in any other coastal or island country…like Haiti, Fiji or Madagascar.

Over the years, Japan has built perhaps the most advanced earthquake warning system, deploying thousands of seismographic sensors across the whole country and setting up a quick broadcast system using a one-to-many version of text messaging called SMS-CB (short message service – cell broadcast). 

Now a quick segue to earthquake101…….  An earthquake typically has two types of tremors  – less destructive but faster P-waves and slightly slower but damaging shear or S-waves. The speed difference between the two, received from thousands of ground sensors, allowed Japan to assess location and severity sending warnings within seconds, not only to citizens, but also to public infrastructure to initiate emergency procedures. For instance, the residents of Tokyo, which was 373 km from the epicenter, had a valuable 80 seconds to take life-saving steps to safety. Other areas of Japan, especially Northern Japan, perhaps had shorter windows, but still a valuable few seconds to react.

Interestingly, here in California, researchers at Stanford University are pursuing a crowd-sourcing technology – Quake-Catcher Network – aggregating data from volunteer laptop accelerometers to detect quakes. 

.....The Japan disaster is also a test case to gauge the progress of tsunami prediction technology since the Asian tsunami of 2004. Clearly the series of sensors spread across the Pacific and the Indian ocean floor (http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/) and the complicated codes to process all the data from them are paying off. The local tsunami warning in Japan came three minutes after the quake struck while the one from the regional Pacific Tsunami Warning Center came within nine minutes . As a result, residents of the hardest-hit areas in Northern Japan had 15 minutes of warning, saving many lives, yet not soon enough for tens of thousands of missing. The response time may not still be at its desired best, yet it’s a lot of progress since 2004.

Technology aside, I cannot help being amazed at how exemplary and powerful the innate head-bowing Japanese politeness could be at this devastating time as I see the pictures of Sendai residents waiting in a mile-long rainy queue outside a food store. The power of national discipline over social chaos could not have been more apparent.  The contrast indeed was striking, given the pictures of mayhem and marauding that often accompanies disaster and misery. The ongoing nuclear mess notwithstanding, this is one country that will surely rebuild once again.